USAGE

The player starts in Search View. From here you can search for songs in
your song database. You need to first set up the database, however, by
clicking "Add Songs".
To set up the database, add the folders that contain your karaoke
songs. Select which type of files you are interested in adding to the
search database (CDG, MPG etc). Click "Look Inside Zips" if you also
want to search inside any ZIP files found in the folders for more
karaoke songs.
When you have finished adding folders, and setting your preferences,
click "Scan Now" to start building the database. This can take some
time but only needs to be done once. The search engine then searches
your database, rather than searching the hard disk every time you
search for a song.
Once you have set up your database, clicking "Save" will save the
database and settings for the next time you run the program. (The
information is saved in a .pykaraoke folder in your home directory).
If you get more karaoke files, don’t forget to rescan the hard disk and
build the database again. Otherwise the new files won’t be visible in
the search engine.
With your database set up, you are ready to start searching for and
playing your karaoke songs. From the main window, enter the name of the
song you would like to find and click "Search". This will populate the
Search Results panel below with the matching song files. From here
double-clicking a song plays it directly. You can also add the song to
your playlist by right-clicking on the song and using the popup menu.
There is also a simple explorer-like interface that can be selected
using a drop-down box on the main window ("Folder View"). Using this
you can also play songs directly or add them to the playlist, by
right-clicking on the song and using the popup menu.
In the right-hand side of the window you will find your playlist. Songs
can be added from the search results or folder browser, until you have
built up your playlist. Once ready, click on the song you would like to
start with. When the song is finished playing, the next song down the
playlist will automatically start playing. You can also delete single
songs, or clear the entire playlist by right-clicking on an item in the
playlist.
pykaraoke is actually a GUI frontend which controls three libraries,
pycdg for CDG files, pykar for MIDI/KAR files and pympg for MPEG files.
If you do not wish to use the GUI you can actually start a player
directly from the command-line (or by associating file-types in your
operating system).